Sam Hartsock
I’m the cofounder of qb., a strategy and communications firm that helps organizations navigate complexity by bringing together the right people around the right problems. Through stakeholder engagement, materiality assessments, climate strategy, resilience planning and AI-enabled decision-making, we help turn uncertainty into business intelligence and action.
Since 2017, we’ve intentionally built qb. differently. Rather than a traditional consulting hierarchy, we assemble interdisciplinary teams around each challenge, combining long-term relationships with specialized expertise to help clients solve problems that don’t fit neatly into one discipline.
Our work on stakeholder engagement, materiality and resilience has been featured in Higher Ground: How Businesses Can Do the Right Thing in a Turbulent World, the Harvard Business Review Big Ideas series, the Women Changing the World podcast, Forbes and the Aspen Institute, and through qb.’s publications, Stakeholder Engagement That Doesn’t Suck and People-First Resilience: A Field Guide.
Before founding qb., I worked across activism, fashion, digital campaigns and mission-driven brands with organizations including Change.org, Remake and TOMS, where I became fascinated by the intersection of storytelling, systems change and why so many institutions struggle to align their values with the way they operate.
I also write Build Something Better on Substack, where I explore leadership, ambition, care, motherhood and what it means to build businesses—and lives—with intention.